Scandal in Babylon

by Barbara Hambly

  Ned Bergen’s assistant, Ned Devine – Ned the Lesser, he was called – helped her move chairs, make-up, roses, picnic-baskets, gramophone, and pillows to the shade of a couple of beach umbrellas set up just outside the camera-lines. By their third trip scene fifteen was finished – close-ups and all – and Doc Larousse and his minions were shifting reflectors and setting their coffee cups on the bases of the statues again. Emma had left the lap-dogs for last in the moving process, and when she went back to the three little wicker carry-boxes in the echoey cavern of the stage – already being set up for the orgy tomorrow – she found the door of Buttercreme’s box open. Both the little dog, and her Russian-leather leash, were gone.

  Emma strode quickly to the rear doors and peered through. For a moment she thought she glimpsed Kitty, reassuringly (and a little surprisingly) where she should be … then realized that the dark-haired girl in the gauze and diamonds was in fact Kitty’s stand-in, Ginny Field. No sign of Kitty herself could be seen in the milling confusion of dancing-boys, wardrobe ladies, men carrying make-up boxes, Babylonian hierophants and a few stray Praetorian Guards. She went back to the other boxes and made sure of her first impression: that Chang Ming and Black Jasmine were still in them, wagging eager tails at the sight of her.

  Odd. She’d never known Kitty to walk one of her ‘celestial angel muffins’ without the other two. She straightened up, and was preparing to pick up Chang Ming’s box when both dogs turned their heads sharply and growled.

  At the same moment, Emma’s nostrils were assailed by a rancid cocktail of unwashed body-linen, cheap cigars, stale bay rum and even staler whiskey. Turning just as swiftly, she saw behind her in the stage’s semi-darkness a tall, broad-shouldered man, the hazy glare of the spring afternoon outside glinting on his slick dark hair.

  ‘Kitty here?’ The tobacco-scarred baritone brought a fresh gust of last night’s liquor and this morning’s coffee. ‘Kitty – ah – de la Rose …’ The glare thrown by a reflector outside showed Emma the fleshy remains of what had to have been dazzling handsomeness at least fifteen years ago. In their pouches of fat, his eyes were cerulean blue, and his tobacco-browned teeth were even and straight. What could still be seen of his original jawline and cheekbones was reminiscent of a Greek god.

  Something about the way he carried himself said actor. But any would-be actor in Hollywood – especially on a visit to a studio – would take more care to dress in clean clothes.

  Certainly any actor who knew enough about Hollywood to want to make an impression on Kitty.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Emma stepped politely but firmly in front of him as he made to brush past her and onto the garden set. ‘She’s filming …’

  ‘I’ll wait, honey. I think she’ll see me.’ He looked her up and down as if startled to see someone almost as tall as himself in a skirt. ‘You tell her Rex is here. And you tell her not to try slippin’ out the back way, neither.’

  Bootlegger …

  Emma’s heart sank. She knew peddlers of illegal liquor – and worse things – lurked around the studios. A sizeable number of both stars and crew relied on contraband ‘pick-me-ups’ to get through long days and brutal past-midnight shoots under the hammering glare of the kliegs. Emma had heard from several sources that the Los Angeles Police Department made a comfortable living from graft and wouldn’t have dreamed of interfering.

  ‘They’ll be shooting, probably, as long as daylight lasts,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘So you may be in for a long wait. I’ll let Miss de la Rose know, of course, Mr …’

  ‘Festraw,’ said Rex. ‘Rex Festraw. And I don’t think she’ll make me wait.’

  He gave her a grimy sidelong grin. ‘She can’t have forgotten me. I’m her husband.’

  TWO

  When she told him, Zal said a word that Emma remembered Jim saying, that time when the motorcar he’d borrowed to drive with her into the Cotswolds one afternoon had gotten a puncture ten miles from Oxford, just as it was coming on to rain. She assumed that it was Yiddish but he’d refused to translate. She made a mental note to ask Zal its meaning, on some occasion when the studio wasn’t facing serious scandal.

  ‘Where’d you put him?’ Zal asked her now.

  ‘In Kitty’s dressing room.’ This was in a wing of the Hacienda, the original adobe farmhouse on whose land the studio had been built.

  ‘You lock him in?’ Behind him, through those great rear doors, Emma could see Madge Burdon pacing Nero’s garden like Napoleon on the eve of Waterloo. The studio musicians, grouped around the plinth of the nearest statue, were playing pinochle and smoking. Emma winced a little at the statue: it was a life-sized plaster replica of Michelangelo’s David, impressive but 450 years too late for Ancient Rome.

  ‘I did think about it,’ Emma acknowledged, and tucked a strand of her mouse-brown hair back into the neat bun at the back of her head. ‘But it seemed to me that an irate husband suing the studio for wrongful imprisonment would not help matters. Where is Kitty?’

  ‘Looking for Buttercreme.’ Zal polished his glasses on another of his clean handkerchiefs. His voice was non-committal. ‘She said.’

  Madge was close enough behind him at that moment to hear this theory, and flung up her hands. ‘How long can it take her to catch the damn mutt anyway?’ she demanded. ‘With those short little legs, the thing can’t run that fast.’

  Miss Burdon had obviously never attempted to corral Buttercreme when the little dog was scuttling for cover. Mary Blanque of Wardrobe – sitting on Nero’s throne sewing fake diamonds onto an extremely abbreviated brassiere – took a peanut from her apron pocket and tossed it to Socrates the elephant. ‘She’ll be back, honey.’

  ‘Buttercreme?’ asked Emma, startled.

  ‘According to Kitty’ – Zal’s tone remained carefully neutral – ‘somebody left the door of Buttercreme’s crate open. Kitty dashed off to look for her.’

  It IS the stuntman. Or that extra from Laemmle.

  ‘Buttercreme’s so timid you could leave the crate open all day and she wouldn’t venture out,’ protested Emma. ‘I can barely get her out to walk her.’

  Or maybe that saxophonist she made such a disgrace of herself over last week at the Coconut Grove …

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Zal. ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘Could be worse,’ he pointed out. ‘This is Hollywood—’

  ‘I don’t believe I want to know.’

  He guided her back through the shadows of Nero’s half-constructed banqueting hall, and out the front door to the studio ‘street’. ‘You tell Fishy?’

  ‘He said he’d try to reach Mr Pugh by telephone.’ They threaded their way through a forest of light stands and then half a regiment of Louis XV dining chairs outside the main doors of Stage Two. ‘But I thought we’d better warn Kitty, so she doesn’t return to her dressing room and encounter Mr Festraw unawares.’ And – Emma didn’t say, but she saw this, too, in her friend’s eyes – so that Kitty would have time to prepare a story for the producer’s edification.

  Zal swore again, but this time his tone was slightly absent-minded, like someone who has encountered a long-petrified hairball behind a couch. ‘Fishbein have any idea who Kitty’s barneymugging these days?’

  Emma sighed. ‘He was less than helpful. In fact he suggested we consult the Los Angeles telephone directory, which is not fair, or true!’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, no. There’s a lot of ugly men in that directory.’ They stepped close to the wall of the carpentry shop, to avoid a troop of Ruritanian cavalry, on the way to the palace revolution about to erupt on Stage Two. ‘You ever heard Kitty mention a kid named Eliot Jordan?’

  Emma considered. ‘She has a photograph of a very nice-looking young man in her room. I think it’s signed, Eliot.’

  ‘Damn it. I was afraid of that. Pugh was all set to sign Jordan back in January for eight-fifty a week, which if you ask me is pretty good for a kid of eighteen.’ They emerged from between the buildings, crossed the open
ground that lay before the Hacienda, and headed for the three-story monolith of the prop warehouse. Emma cast a worried glance at the long, two-story wing of the big former farmhouse that housed the ‘star’ dressing rooms, but the door of Kitty’s remained closed.

  ‘Then Lou Jesperson at Enterprise stole Jordan out from under Pugh’s nose with an offer of a thousand. Pugh is still talking about getting after the kid – and Jesperson – for breach of contract, but he’ll never make it stick.’

  Emma wondered if she should have asked Mr Fishbein to have one of the studio guards keep an eye on the door. Or would that have drawn the attention of Mrs Turnbit, who might very well still be on the lot? She had looked like a woman with extremely sharp eyes. ‘How much trouble would there be if Kitty was meeting young Mr Jordan?’

  ‘A shitload.’ They turned the corner into the narrow ‘street’ between the prop warehouse and the commissary, which also housed the make-up rooms. Beyond these stretched the back lot, five acres of standing sets for medieval villages, generic forests, and a noisy construction site where Ned Bergen’s myrmidons were, in defiance of the adage, attempting to build Rome in a day – or in any case in a week.

  ‘Frank’s in the middle of a divorce – his fourth, I think – and he’s like a bear with a hemorrhoid. He’s not gonna be thrilled if he hears Kitty’s been making nookie between takes with a kid who “betrayed” him. Dang it.’ Zal stopped, and looked around him at the extras in peasant garb (and one lost, lone Roman soldier – Miss Burdon is going to have that one flogged before the Legions …) milling outside the doors of Wardrobe. Men in shirtsleeves came and went between the long sheds of the garage and those of the toybox jungle of the studio nursery. Emma guessed what he was thinking. The back corners of the prop warehouse, or the farther reaches of the back lot, went unvisited for weeks at a time, and could shelter an army of fugitive lovers.

  ‘Where would you go,’ asked Zal, propping his glasses on the bridge of his nose, ‘if you wanted to get your ashes hauled?’

  ‘I would go to City Hall,’ replied Emma, a trifle tartly, ‘and get married.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s exactly what Kitty did,’ he retorted with a grin. ‘For once in her life. And if she hadn’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’

  She couldn’t keep from laughing, though she could imagine what her mother – and certainly Aunt Estelle! – would have to say on the subject of Kitty’s amours. ‘Oh, dear, I suppose you’re right …’ And they would CERTAINLY say that Hollywood – and Kitty – were a Bad Influence on ME … ‘All right, then, I’d pick the warehouse. I know there are beds in there, and nobody goes there …’

  ‘Are you kidding? Every bootlegger and dope merchant in town uses it for hand-offs.’ He opened the building’s small side door for her, and flicked the electric switch just inside. ‘And anyway, what makes you think Kitty’s gonna bother with a bed?’ He waved to an unsavory little man sitting on a bejeweled Turkish throne (MUCH nicer than Nero’s!) in the shadows beside a ferocious-looking stuffed grizzly bear. A small suitcase lay at his feet.

  ‘Hi, Taffy. You see anybody come in here, in the last half-hour?’

  ‘You mean other than that Turnbit broad?’ Taffy took his meerschaum pipe from his mouth.

  ‘Mrs Turnbit came in here?’ Emma gasped, startled.

  ‘Just put her head around the door,’ explained Taffy, in accents that on radio shows (Emma had discovered) seemed to signify inhabitants of the lower depths of the New York waterfront. ‘She saw me and took a powder. The door was unlocked,’ he explained to Zal, ‘on accounta I got an appointment here, see. Meetin’ a man about a dog.’

  ‘How long you been here?’

  ‘’Bout since two.’ He checked a gold pocket watch that was visibly more expensive than his clothing.

  Zal said, ‘Thanks,’ and led Emma back out. ‘Bootlegger,’ he explained as he shut the door behind them. ‘Deliveryman. Works for the Cornero Brothers.’

  Emma rolled her eyes.

  ‘Could be worse,’ he said again. And then: ‘You call a guard and make sure Thelma Turnbit actually left the lot?’

  ‘No.’ Emma felt a flash of embarrassment. ‘She said she’d find her own way out.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet she will. Always call a guard, Em.’ Zal patted her shoulder. ‘She’s a gossip columnist, it’s her business not to go straight back out of here. She’s probably still making the rounds of her informants on the lot … Christ knows how she got past the gate in the first place. All we need is for her to spot Kitty and what’s-his-name coming out the back door of Stage Three all rumpled and giggly—’

  ‘Well, they have to emerge fairly soon,’ reasoned Emma. ‘I mean, she’s got to get back to shoot scene eight before poor Miss Burdon dies of an apoplexy.’

  ‘Miss Burdon wouldn’t die if you shot her with a siege howitzer.’ Zal cast a calculating glance toward the Hacienda as they emerged into the open again. ‘But she will get the Praetorian Guard out after me – that elephant rents by the hour. Fishy might be able to … Dang it,’ he added, with another glance at the Hacienda. ‘The Pettingers are here.’

  And indeed, Emma could see, on the shaded front veranda of the Hacienda, a man and a woman, both tall, both rawboned, both dressed with a frumpiness which was almost aggressive, in conversation with Foremost’s publicity chief.

  ‘Evangelists,’ he explained, to Emma’s look of inquiry. ‘Religious fanatics. They have a radio show, Friday evenings, and their own church down on Broadway. Champions of Christian decency and moral censorship. You shoulda heard ’em on the subject of Kitty’s last film.’

  Recalling some of the more lurid details of Royal Desire, Emma could understand their indignation. In the shadows of the veranda, Conrad Fishbein – obese, fair, and smiling benevolently behind horn-rimmed spectacles – was holding the door open for his guests. The female Pettinger – Brother and sister, or husband and wife? – drew her skirt aside, as if contact with a ‘film person’ (as Aunt Estelle would have put it) would give her leprosy.

  ‘What the hell are they doing on the lot today, anyway?’ Zal started to say something else, paused, then looked again at Emma as he turned to lead the way toward the garages. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  Am I all right? Emma considered the question, and the letter in her pocket, and the life she’d left behind her in England.

  Why is it that everything that happens here is always interrupted by filming or a deadline or a crisis? Marcus Aurelius, she reflected, would have reminded her that this was no more than to be expected of life … Certainly of life here.

  No wonder everyone in Hollywood drinks.

  ‘It’s not anything that needs to be dealt with now,’ she said.

  ‘Can we maybe deal with it over dinner at Cole’s Pacific Electric Buffet this evening, if you’re up to it?’ he suggested, a little shyly. ‘Depending on how late shooting runs?’

  Emma felt the sudden sensation of having stepped back from everyone’s histrionic love lives, and onto a little island of sanity. ‘I’d like that.’ Placing her hand gently on his shoulder, she leaned down a little – a very little – to kiss him. MORE proof that I’m being corrupted …

  She could almost see her mother’s frown, and the quick, disapproving shake of Aunt Estelle’s head.

  ‘I think probably,’ she added, ‘you had best get back to Rome before they do call out the Praetorian Guard – or the Ruritanian cavalry. Kitty can’t have gone to the backlot. You know how she hates to walk anywhere, even for the sake of love. I have a good view of her dressing-room door from here, and if I miss her here, you can catch her on the set, if you would. We’ll just have to trust Mr Fishbein – words I never thought I should hear myself say. If—’

  A flash of crimson at the end of the studio street caught her eye. ‘There! What did I tell you?’

  Like a bird of paradise in her gorgeous kimono, Kitty was headed for her dressing room from the direction of the building where the unused film stock was stored
. It took all Emma’s training not to pull up her skirt above her knees and cross the dusty square at a run, or to bellow Kitty’s name, à la Madge Burdon. She walked, however, as if pursued by a troop of Ruritanian cavalry (or a ferocious-looking stuffed grizzly bear) and Zal broke away from her and dashed ahead.

  Buttercreme, cradled in Kitty’s arms, saw them and began to wriggle eagerly, recognizing friends, and Kitty halted in her tracks.

  ‘Darlings!’ She scampered towards them, and Emma ascertained at once that whatever else she’d been doing, her beautiful sister-in-law hadn’t been indulging in a romantic interlude with an eighteen-year-old actor or anybody else. Her lipstick and eye-paint were too perfect. ‘Oh, thank God I’ve found you! I didn’t dare go back to the set with Buttercreme here and I simply have to repair my face! Is Madge absolutely furious with me? I simply couldn’t—’

  ‘Your husband is here,’ said Emma.

  Kitty froze in the act of shoving Buttercreme into Emma’s arms. ‘Clayton?’ Staring up at Emma in dismay over the little dog’s head, she gasped the name of her most recent.

  ‘Rex.’

  Under a lavish coat of Motion Picture Yellow, Kitty blenched. ‘Oh, my God … Where is he?’

  Emma nodded toward the ersatz Spanish adobe. ‘In your dressing room – I hope.’

  ‘What’s he doing here? What does he want?’

  ‘Money, I assume,’ said Emma, with a touch of asperity.

  ‘Emma, please,’ whispered Kitty. ‘Don’t go all English on me.’ She looked wildly around, as if she expected to see Mrs Turnbit, notebook in hand, lurking behind the corner of Stage One. ‘This is terrible! This is … this is ghastly! Does Frank know?’